| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: up a proud little business with no capital but his
own skill and foresight, and had proved himself
a man. In his daughter, John Bergson recog-
nized the strength of will, and the simple direct
way of thinking things out, that had charac-
terized his father in his better days. He would
much rather, of course, have seen this likeness
in one of his sons, but it was not a question of
choice. As he lay there day after day he had to
accept the situation as it was, and to be thank-
ful that there was one among his children to
O Pioneers! |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: There are few traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the
shore as it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.
It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the
depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are
the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and
cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,
in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: wines, he was little to be pitied on the conditions of his
exile. Villon, in a remarkably bad ballad, written in a
breath, heartily thanked and fulsomely belauded the
Parliament; the ENVOI, like the proverbial postscript of a
lady's letter, containing the pith of his performance in a
request for three days' delay to settle his affairs and bid
his friends farewell. He was probably not followed out of
Paris, like Antoine Fradin, the popular preacher, another
exile of a few years later, by weeping multitudes; (1) but I
daresay one or two rogues of his acquaintance would keep him
company for a mile or so on the south road, and drink a
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